To RTO or not to RTO? CEOs worldwide are debating if asking employees to give up their plush work-from-home setups and return to the office is a good idea.
Google’s former CEO, Eric Schmidt, said remote working was to blame for the company losing its competitive edge to startups, including OpenAI.
“Google decided that work-life balance and going home early and working from home was more important than winning,” Schmidt said during a lecture at Stanford University on August 13. The talk was published on YouTube before being taken down.
Schmidt later told The Wall Street Journal he “misspoke,” but his comments have further fuelled the in-office debate.
While Google is tightening its hybrid work policy and Apple has faced problems trying to enforce hybrid working, Meta and Amazon have already pushed RTO or “return to hub” mandates. Most recently, Dell told hybrid workers to come into the office three days a week.
However, a recent study on RTO policies by researchers at Katz Graduate School of Business at the University of Pittsburg found forcing reluctant employees back into the office lowers job satisfaction without having a significant impact on productivity.
And not all workers are willing to make the sacrifice.
Business Insider spoke to four people who shared their experiences with RTO mandates and why they quit their jobs or withdrew from hiring processes before going back into the office.
A woman moved states days before Amazon enforced RTO
Sophia Carter
Sophia Carter had been working remotely for years when, in 2022, she landed a job as a talent-management specialist at Amazon.
She told BI as a person with a disability, she’d been working remotely years before the pandemic, as a result of stressful in-office experiences.
Amazon employees were working remotely when she joined the company in September 2022. Carter, who was based in Chicago, decided to move to Raleigh, North Carolina.
She said she was tired of the long, dark winters in Chicago and wanted a metropolitan location that was warmer, safe, and not too big. Raleigh checked all those boxes, according to Carter.
She spoke with her manager and skip-level manager about the move several months before she relocated to Raleigh in March 2023.
Carter said none of her managers knew an RTO mandate would be imposed, and she didn’t foresee having to return to the office soon. But just five days after she moved to Raleigh, Amazon issued an order for its employees to return to offices in their “hub” cities.
Carter said she enjoyed living in Raleigh and couldn’t afford to move back to Chicago or another hub city. She started applying for jobs at other companies in April and landed one at a Fortune 500 company three months later.
Carter told BI if Amazon had never announced RTO or layoffs she would have probably stayed at the company.
An Amazon spokesperson said they believed being in the office at least three days a week was “the right long-term approach.” They added they had processes to accomodate execaptions and provide financial assistance when asking employees to relocate.
A woman quit her UCLA job after they announced RTO for 2 days a week
Rhiannon Little-Surowski landed a job as a DEI executive at UCLA in March 2021. She told BI the fact that the job was remote was the main draw for applying. She was already planning to move from California to Michigan with her family when she got the job.
Working from home suited Little-Surowski’s lifestyle. She could drop her daughter at school in the morning and, on the side, help her husband scale his web business and investments – all while making a positive impact in higher education.
When UCLA issued an RTO mandate stipulating that employees had to work from the office at least two days a week, Little-Surowski had already moved to Michigan.
She told BI UCLA have never made it explicitly clear that she’d have to live in-state and her employers weren’t aware she’d moved to Michigan. The change in policy made her anixous.
Little-Surowski said she considered commuting back to Califorina for two days a week, but as a mother of two young children, she found the prospect nerve-racking.
Little-Surowski asked if she could work in the office four days a week, every other week, instead of two days each week, given the time and cost of flying from Michigan. Though her request was approved, she found flying back and forth a challenge.
When Little-Surowski had her third child, she decided to quit to focus on the family business and caring for her kids. She told BI she couldn’t justify sacrificing her dreams and family time to help an organization reach its goals.
She said she’s glad she resigned, even though she sometimes misses her colleagues and working full-time.
An Amazon worker faces losing their job if they don’t relocate
A software developer took a job at Amazon advertised as fully remote in 2022. The developer, who had worked for Amazon in the past but had left, rejoined Amazon because the company said it had no plans for RTO.
They were working in another city, where they owned a house and had lived for 13 years, when they were told in February 2023 that they had to return to the office in Seattle or switch teams.
In September of last year, the developer told BI they were angry and frustrated because they had returned to Amazon specifically to work remotely. The company’s backtracking on remote work was a huge breach of trust, they added.
The employee told their local managers they wouldn’t relocate and, at the time of the interview, had been looking for developer jobs at other companies.
They told BI they’re also worried about RTO mandates being enforced at other companies. They said being unwilling to move meant their job would always be at risk for reasons entirely unrelated to their performance, adding that thought was scary.
An Amazon spokesperson said they believed being in the office at least three days a week “drives culture, team connection, innovation, and learning.” They added they had consistently explained their approach to remote work would “evolve” since the pandemic.
A single mom turned down a job because of its RTO mandate
Courtesy of Kimberley Whitaker
Lawyer Kimberley Whitaker worked in the office two days a week from September 2022. As a single mom, Whitaker said she had to get up at 5:15 a.m. to make it into the office but enjoyed seeing her colleagues in person on those days.
Whitaker told Business Insider in an interview last September she quit her job in May 2023 to spend the summer with her child. She said she applied to another legal role in July 2023, which seemed like a good fit on paper.
During her interview, the company said employees must work from their office five days a week.
When she heard their office protocol, she told BI she was disappointed. She would have to put her daughter in school childcare programs before and after school each day and maybe additional evening childcare.
The company wanted Whitaker to proceed to the next round of interviews, but she decided to withdraw from the application process because she didn’t think she could fit RTO around caring for her daughter.
Whitaker told BI in September 2023 that she thought requiring employees to RTO full-time was outdated and if the role was hybrid she would have considered moving forward with the interview.
